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The Use of Queries for Ranking Purposes

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

There is one ranking factor that you almost never see mentioned on any of the popular SEM blogs. You might see it mentioned on a forum or a blog comment, but it’s definitely a topic that isn’t discussed enough or in any amount of detail. I’m going to do what I can to shed some light on the matter. The tests that I reference are not done in a scientific way and might not be entirely accurate. My primary goal with this post is just to get you thinking about the theory that I present and to make it a larger talking point within the industry.

Anyone who has done any significant amount of keyword research knows that a lot of people use Google, Yahoo, or whatever their default search engine may be to navigate the internet instead of using the address bar as any logical person would expect. Having said that, if ten thousand people searched for “shoes.com” and 300 searched for “discount-shoes.com,” which do you think is more credible and more sought after? Now you’re getting it. Let’s play with this a little bit. What if 2,500 people searched for “shoes.com Nike”? Would “Nike” be associated with “shoes.com” and therefore any key phrase which includes the word “Nike” would be more likely to pull up the shoes.com website? I don’t know but it would certainly make sense, in my opinion.

The test that I conducted went like this. For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that I own shoes.com and shoe-info.com. I want shoes.com to rank for “Nike”. Shoe-info.com gets around 7,500 unique daily visitors to the home page. I place a few auto loading iframes on shoe-info.com. One loads the Google result pages for “shoes.com nike” and the other just for “shoes.com”. I have another two iframes loading for Yahoo with the exact same queries. So that’s 4 hidden iframes in total. I have these iframes set to be as small as possible, so no one sees them. I, of course, do not recommend doing this on any website that has any meaning to you, for obvious reasons.

So what are the results? A few months later, I rank #1 on Google AND Yahoo for the targeted term and my other rankings have increased across the board. It’s as if the search engines have suddenly trusted my domain. Of course, the term wasn’t Nike, but it was a fairly competitive, mainstream term, and during this period I did not engage in any other SEO practices, such as link building. The site wasn’t advertised offline and did not receive any significant traffic. Even the site’s architecture wasn’t optimized! I didn’t truly expect it to work, not because I doubted that queries helped rankings, but because the iframe shouldn’t send a referrer for the query. I assumed Google and Yahoo would completely discount these queries, at least for ranking purpose, due to the lack of a referrer.

The best SEOs use their common sense and then test their theories. It has always been my belief that 95% of SEO is common sense. It’s always a great idea to put yourself in the place of the search engines and to think about what data you would use to rank websites. Sure, it is possible to exploit domain queries, but it’s also possible to exploit linking methods. Google simply can’t ignore a ranking technique because it’s exploitable, so it's a good idea to never discount a theory because you think it’s exploitable or else you may find yourself behind in the search engine results.

Down the road, the algo will either be tweaked or the eyes of the Search gods will notice it and begin to dig.

Eventually, an adjustment will be made. If you could claim ignorance you might be forgiven but if you choose to do anything like this you will be branded as a false manipulator and any website that has your finger print on it will most likely suffer.

Personally, I can't risk my very limited reputation on it or my clients rankings.

The bottom line is that we all want to dominate the rankings, but if we are doing it in a way that presents a false favorite it is only in the Search Engines best long term interest to figure it out and adjust. If their results end up being less relevant the fast and fickle users will go elsewhere.

Thanks to everyone for the positive comments! I want to remind everyone that the tests I performed weren't scientific by any means, so please don't spend excessive resources trying to make this work before testing it yourself.

This seems a little more on the dark gray hat side of the scale, but it's definitely interesting. It's good to think how the average user actually uses Google etc. as opposed to how we Internet veterans do.

Intriguing...I'll need to think how I can implement something like this that hopefully isn't dark gray. Maybe just the domain before the .com or whatever. Some people might search for that, having heard of a site's name before.

Two days of reading the blog and already I'm getting tons of new ideas. Merci beaucoup!

Seen this tactic used before, and higly effectively. The results were, however, short lived. It's not something I've been tempted to try. Be interested to see how long great SERPS can be maintained. You did the right thing not directly mentioning the site!

I have heard that if your site is clicked on on the search engine result pages it will increase the rankings. I heard this from two reputable seo people. I would also think that if something is being searched for that the search engines robots would be smart enough to go and look for it.

Wonderful post! I'm going to mention that searching for domains this summer on G and Y helped them get indexed, so presumably searches are indeed a ranking factor. That said, it would be more valuable to see how much weight is put into this. I thought initially that those search-induced indexings were equivalent to submission to the engines... seems here that you've shown it to be an actual positive ranking factor.

Regarding the Query tactic - I am surprised at the results, but I think you did quite a good job in trying it. I do believe that google collates associated keyword data to rank terms searched for together - and this may be a method for testing just that.